Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?: Essays on Modern Art and Theology in Conversation
By Daniel A. Siedell and Robyn O'Neil
()
About this ebook
Siedell combines his experience in the contemporary art world with a theological perspective that serves to deepen the experience of art, allowing the work of art to work as art and not covert philosophy or theology, or visual illustrations of ideas, meanings, and worldviews.
Who's Afraid of Modern Art? celebrates the surprising beauty of art that emerges from and embraces pain and suffering, if only we take the time to listen. Indeed, as Siedell reveals, a painting is much more than meets the eye.
So, who's afraid of modern art? Siedell's answer might surprise you.
Daniel A. Siedell
Daniel A. Siedell is Presidential Scholar and Art Historian in Residence at The King's College in New York City and Associate Professor of Christianity & Culture at Knox Theological Seminary, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? - Daniel A. Siedell
Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?
Essays on Modern Art & Theology in Conversation
454118911.psdDaniel A. Siedell
Foreword by Robyn O’Neil
14604.pngWho’s Afraid of Modern Art?
Essays on Modern Art & Theology in Conversation
Copyright © 2015 Daniel A. Siedell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-442-8
EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-791-0
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Siedell, Daniel A., 1966–
Who’s afraid of modern art? : essays on modern art and theology in conversation / Daniel A. Siedell.
xviii + 160 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-442-8
1. Painting, Modern—20th century. 2. Painting, Modern—21st century. 3. Art and society—History—20th century. 4. Art and society—History—21st century. I. Title.
BR115.A8 S58 2015
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Do not interpretations belong to God?
—Genesis 40:8
Asher Lev, [art] is a tradition of goyim and pagans. Its values are goyisch and pagan. Its concepts are goyisch and pagan. Its way of life is goyisch and pagan.
—Jacob Kahn, in Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
[D]o not venture into the metaphysics of the fine arts without being initiated into the orgies and Eleusinian mysteries.
—J.G. Hamann
Illustrations
Cover: Robyn O’Neil, Red Sky, 2013; oil pastel & graphite on paper, 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches; Courtesy of Artist and Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas.
Frontispiece, Robyn O’Neil, Come, all that is quiet, 2009; graphite on paper; 60 x 60 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas, Texas.
Figure 1: Robyn O’Neil, These final hours embrace at last; this is our ending, this is our past, 2007; graphite on paper; 83 x 166 ¾ inches; collection of The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Gift of Marshall R. Young Oil Co. in Honor of George Marshall Young, Sr., Chairman.
Figure 2: Robyn O’Neil, Hell, 2008–2011, triptych, graphite on paper; 82 x 172 inches; Courtesy of the Artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.
Back Image, Robyn O’Neil, These final hours embrace (detail).
Foreword
It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake
—Frederick Douglass
Dan Siedell is a rare gift to artists. We aren’t typically gifted with feeling understood. In fact, that lack of understanding might be exactly why we make art. Every image, an attempt to find someone who might recognize something familiar, might fathom what we reveal in our work. Reading Dan’s essays is akin to finding a secret ally. He fights the war with us. He shines the flashlight into our shadows; sweeps the cave. It is not to be taken lightly, what he does, because most people are not compelled to remain in the wake of an artist’s path. It can be, as he so beautifully and often describes, a terrifying endeavor. Yet he does it, again and again, with reverence and with heart. And he’s brave enough to love that the very thing he’s trying to wrangle is the most perplexing paragon.
Artists often attempt to unearth thoughts that might be easier left dormant and ignored. We excavate, we visually proclaim. Dive in, expose, assess. And after this nonstop process of molding and scrutiny, our work is displayed, made vulnerable to be seen and deciphered. It is then that we yearn for something else, a conversation. We need proof that what we’ve created might just make sense to someone. And that’s when Dan comes in, to illuminate. With language, with bottomless understanding, with a way of crystallizing incredibly mysterious things, some of those things being mysterious even to us, the people who have created them.
It is my radical belief that it takes kindness and compassion to truly get to the center of art, to feel it swimming in your pores. Dan Siedell is the reason I know this to be true. His unparalleled intellect is met with his empathy, and as a result, we are blessed with words that will go down in history. This book of essays should, and no doubt will, be required reading for a long time to come for artists, art lovers, Christians, the spiritually involved and curious, or even if you’re simply human. These essays will make you wonder what should matter, and they’ll help you see the unseen. In his essay Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?,
Dan notes that caring about modern art is what he’s been called to do with his life. He praises God for his being fearful of modern art. To be, as he is, in love with something that causes such grief, confusion, suffering . . . well, one can’t get any nobler than that.
Robyn O’Neil
Acknowledgments
I am thankful that my editor Rodney Clapp took the chance to publish an unusual book like this. Tim Dalrymple at Patheos gave me the opportunity to write regularly about art, culture, and theology at a crucial time. Many of the essays included in this book have their origins, in one way or another, as blog posts for Patheos.
Robyn O’Neil’s drawings have had a significant influence on my work as a critic and curator. Having had the privilege to write about her work on several occasions over the years, I am thus honored that she has graciously agreed to return the favor.
Dr. Jonathan A. Linebaugh, Associate Professor of New Testament at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has been a friend, conversation partner, and theological mentor.
Although they were written in Fort Lauderdale, many of these essays were conceived in Charlottesville, Virginia. During my time as Scholar in Residence at the New City Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, I had the opportunity to think and talk about modern art and theology with numerous conversation partners, and the late Patricia Jones and John McCray were extraordinary hosts. The first essay, Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?
exists only because Paul Walker, Rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, invited me to speak on the subject. Rev. Greg Thompson, Senior Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, has offered crucial intellectual and pastoral support. David Zahl, Executive Director of Mockingbird Ministries, has been a consistent source of encouragement. My gratitude extends to the entire Mockingbird family, especially William McDavid, who provided rigorous and insightful editorial work on the manuscript. Dr. Michael Horton of the White Horse Inn and Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California has encouraged me in numerous ways, not least of which has been his insatiable curiosity about this strange cultural practice called modern art.
The final stages of this book benefited immensely from the institutional support of The King’s College in New York City, where I was appointed Presidential Scholar and Art Historian in Residence in September 2013. It has created the intellectual space for me to continue to do what I do among supportive and talented faculty, eager and intelligent students, and under the humane leadership of Dr. Harry Bleattler, Chair of the Division of Media, Culture, and the Arts, and President Greg Thornbury, to whom I am grateful for his commitment to the work I do. I also want to thank Rev. Jacob Smith, Dusty Brown, and my friends at Calvary/St. George’s Episcopal Church, which has become my church home away from home.
When my family moved from Nebraska to south Florida in July 2011, Pastor Tullian Tchividjian promised us that Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church would become our family in south Florida. We did not realize how true his words would be. Tullian’s tireless proclamation of God’s mercy and grace, his support for my vocation, and his friendship are, more so than he realizes, responsible not only for this book, but for so much more since that summer of 2011.
My wife, Kerri, and children, Daniel, Morgan, and Jacob, whose lives have been marked in one way or another by my love of modern and contemporary art, have been a constant source of support. They have taught me that there is no greater gift in life than to be loved and to love. It has been this love that has enabled me to freely pursue my love of art.
It is to Kerri, my sweetest friend
(the Goo Goo Dolls), who stood with me one afternoon in front of Jackson Pollock’s magnificent painting Autumn Rhythm (1950) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art twenty-five years ago, and continues to stand with me, that I dedicate this book.
And when we’re old and near the end we’ll go home and start again
(the Goo Goo Dolls).
Introduction
An artist I work with invites me to his studio to see some new paintings he is working on for an upcoming show. It marks a new direction, he thinks, but he’s not sure if they amount to anything. Other than his wife, I am the first person to whom he has shown them. Standing in the middle of his workroom, I am confronted by six canvases, each in various stages of completion. He asks, What do you think?
At this moment, in this situation, standing before particular works of art, most discourse on art falls terribly short. And it is at this moment that Oscar Wilde’s surprising declaration, spoken by Gilbert in The Critic as Artist,
rings most true:
More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it.¹
A scrap of canvas with smelly pigments smeared across it is a vulnerable artifact, confronting the viewer through the most immediate of senses. It unfolds an experience only gradually through time. Moreover, this vulnerable artifact, susceptible to the often hasty and impatient judgments of vision, also emerges precariously from language—words, sentences, talk—to which it can too easily and too quickly return. The artist tells me that he read a line in Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, which created space for some paintings.
The canvases that surround me in his workroom are those that Tolstoy’s sentence wrought. And yet as visual artifacts they have their own particular existence in the world that cannot be reduced to words, sentences, talk—cannot even be reduced to or confined by that one sentence of Tolstoy’s.
And as I experience these unfinished paintings and begin to reflect on the feelings and emotions that their visual appearance generates, the artist asks for my response—through language, that is; through my own words, sentences, and talk. He is not asking for my art historical interpretation or a philosophical discourse. He is asking for language that is a response to my experience of the paintings—what do I see, what do I hear, and thus what are they saying and doing to me?
But this is precisely at the moment where language about art usually fails to offer any help. To the contrary, it often seems as if talking about art, both inside and outside the church, is committed to avoiding this moment. Talk about art outside the church swirls around fashion and entertainment, about the perpetual newness
of political, social, and cultural relevance that everyone
(always in the abstract) knows or needs to know. And talk about art inside the church gravitates toward the abstract and conceptual, from the timeless and ahistorical vagaries of transcendence and the spiritual to the disembodied abstractions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, or the deceptive abstractions of world view analysis. Both approaches—one obsessed with the ephemerality of fashion and the other preoccupied with the idealism of the transcendent—tend to leave untouched how a particular person is addressed by a particular work of art.
Wilde’s surprising claims about the difficulty of talking about art responds to the challenge that the concrete particularity of a painting poses for language. The highest criticism,
Wilde declares, again through Gilbert, deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.
² Works of art, like the paintings I stand before in this artist’s studio, exist to be experienced—to be heard—by a single individual. And it is this impression that is the work
of the painting, and it is this impression with which the critic, according to Wilde, should ultimately concern herself.
Yet the work of art is not a Rorschach test, an image upon which the viewer or the critic can simply impose his experience, ideas, or feelings. It makes the first move. It addresses. It does not merely confirm the viewer’s experience, emotion, or feeling, but deepens, changes, or perhaps even contradicts them. It initiates or makes possible a viewer’s experience, but that experience, that emotion, that feeling did not—could not—exist prior to the viewer being addressed by that painting.
But what the painting says
when it addresses me is often a source of confusion and frustration. Too often we consider a work of art to be an image
that we have to read
in order to get to the ideas,
meanings,
world view,
or values
that are buried or hidden amidst its visual features. We imagine that the aesthetic experience of the work is either a distraction
through which we must sift in order to get to the meaning
or we presume that its capacity to connect emotionally and through the affections is simply a means to address the intellect through the heart. Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, we presume we can find meaning
anywhere, even in paint-smeared scraps of canvas. But, as Wilde’s Gilbert observes, the aim of art is simply to create a mood.
³ That this aim strikes us as insignificant and unimportant is an indication of just how unwilling we are to grant significance and importance to our emotional life, to the life of the affections, which our intellectual life informs.
The challenge of talking about a painting, then, is to maintain, through words, the integrity of the distinctive aesthetic experience that it can offer visually; to use those words and sentences, not to explain, interpret, judge, or otherwise reduce but to expand the experiential space that allows the painting to address the viewer. This challenge is greater still when the words are not spoken in proximity to the painting, whether in the artist’s studio or in a gallery or museum, but when those words are written or published and thus achieve a life of their own as cultural artifacts. These words and sentences can do two things simultaneously. First, they can create a compelling experience for the reader as literature, as its own aesthetic experience, of which the work of art and the critic that stands before it are the protagonists. And second, these words and sentences can open imaginative space for the reader in anticipation of encountering the work under consideration, or, in fact, any subsequent work of art that the reader might encounter in the future. That this book does not contain reproductions of the works of art discussed in these essays is evidence of my commitment to the broader responsibility of talking (and writing) about works of art as a means to encourage and prepare a reader to stand before any work of art.
Moreover, talking about a thing,
as Wilde puts it, is an opportunity to curse as well as bless, to destroy as well as give life (Jas 3:10). And so for Wilde, the critic’s words is nothing if not life-giving, a creation within a creation,
as he calls it, because the critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and thought.
⁴ But the work of art is not merely a pretense for the expression of the critic’s political, cultural, or theological social agenda, or not merely an excuse for the critic to exercise his creative expression. It is the painting that is the impetus, as an artifact that is there, existing outside the critic, an artifact that initiates and generates the critic’s experience as it addresses the one who stands before it. And it is this relationship between the viewer who stands addressed by a scrap of canvas with paint smeared across it that is profoundly theological, that opens a space for that artifact to address the viewer. The church presumes that a work of art’s theological importance is determined exclusively by the subject matter of the content of the work of art or the beliefs or intentions of the artist that produced it. And this presumption has had serious consequences for Christian reflection on aesthetic experience.
My art,
Edvard Munch observed, is self-confession. Through it I seek to clarify my relationship to the world.
But Munch also goes further, hoping that his pictures might be able to help others to clarify their own search for truth.
⁵ The essays in this book are part of my own search for truth and its implications in and through a cultural practice to which I have devoted more than twenty-five years. They are also my confession of faith in art as well as the God whose Word gives it life and enables it to speak (Col 1).
In the artist’s studio I stand before paintings that address me.
How will I respond?
1. Wilde, The Critic As Artist,
209
.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.,
199
.
5. Quoted in Tøjner, Munch in His Own Words,
135
.
Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?
¹
Let’s face it. Modern art is strange and off-putting. It doesn’t behave like we think art should, not impressing us with the artist’s technical capacity to represent a world with which we are familiar and helping us decorate our interior and exterior environments. And so a painting that features distorted, tortured, and emaciated figures, garish colors, and, to our eyes, poorly drawn trees, seems to perform no real artistic function in the world, except to put us on edge. We’re confused that some small pastel and oil drawing, The Scream, painted in 1895 by Edvard Munch, a neurotic Norwegian, sold for $120 million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2011. Or that two years later at Christie’s, Francis Bacon’s triptych of Lucien Freud sold for over $140 million. What are we missing? How can anyone pay that kind of money for pigments smeared across a piece of paper or a scrap of canvas? In fact, we are hard-pressed to account for why anyone would pay even a few hundred dollars for a painting. And so someone must be pulling our leg.
And yet there is something else that haunts us. Perhaps it’s not just a sham, a joke, or a hobby for critical theorists and continental philosophers—perhaps modern art is dangerous. Perhaps it actually teaches us to see the world in ways that produce vice. Perhaps it is a practice that causes us to lose our faith.
Perhaps modern art is something to fear.
My remarks will not ease these fears.
Tonight I come clean about my twenty-five-year relationship with modern art. I will testify to what modern art has done to me as a Christian and as a human being.
In a pivotal scene in Walk the Line, the 2005 movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, record producer Sam Phillips interrupts Cash’s rather bland rendition of a popular gospel song to tell him that he doesn’t need his kind of music. Cash is offended, naturally, and asks why. Phillips responds, because I don’t believe you.
Cash thinks that Phillips is accusing him of not believing